The latest information and perspectives on Oracle Enterprise Manager

Tuesday Sep 16, 2014

Be sure
to check out the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c general session,
Drive the Future of Self-Service IT with Oracle Enterprise Manager
12c [GEN8250].

Session
Abstract:

Successful strategies
for cloud computing and self-service IT demand a unified management solution
that provides visibility, insight, and control across the IT landscape.
In this session, key representatives from Oracle Enterprise Manager Product
Development will discuss customer and partner experiences in deploying
and managing large-footprint private cloud environments encompassing Oracle
Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle Engineered
Systems. In the second part of the session, attendees will get a sneak
preview of several exciting new offerings in the Oracle Enterprise Manager
family. Don’t miss this opportunity to glimpse the future of Oracle’s
systems management offerings.

Monday Sep 15, 2014

Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c, in its fourth year, has seen record levels
of customer adoption. We are excited to showcase many of these customers
throughout our OpenWorld activities, sessions, hands-on labs
and DEMOgrounds this year.

With Oracle Enterprise
Manager's large presence at OpenWorld, we've provided a variety of resources
that you can use to follow all the Oracle Enterprise Manager activities
and events.

Highlights:

Unprecedented number of
customer sessions with over 50 presenting or co-presenting this year.

Full-day track on Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c at the Sunday User Group Forum sponsored
by the IOUG.

General Session and over
40 Oracle-authored track-sessions on Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Wednesday Aug 27, 2014

Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Consolidation Planner is a great tool that helps
you plan and consolidate multiple targets on to a single machine such
as Oracle Exadata. This solution helps you visualize what you have running
in your environment and where you can take advantage of consolidation
in order to maximize resources and lower IT operational costs. Watch the
demo below to get a better understand of how Consolidation Planner works.

Tuesday Aug 26, 2014

As senior vice president of middleware for Oracle in Europe, Dr. Andrew
Sutherland has more than 20 years’ experience in emerging technologies
and their application to business problems. Currently, he manages a team
of architects, business development managers, and technical specialists
who help customers make the best use of their investments in Oracle technologies.

Q. What makes
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c different from competitors' offerings?
A. Oracle Enterprise Manager's approach is unique in that it manages across
the entire Oracle stack, from applications, middleware, and the database
all the way down to servers and storage. That means it can truly unlock
the value of the entire Oracle stack.

Q. What is
the payoff for organizations that adopt such a comprehensive approach?
A. Our customers are able to manage the entire Oracle estate in the most
cost-effective way possible by automating many of their day-to-day tasks.
To give you an idea of its scope, many of our customers have made sure
that Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c’s dashboard is available to their
senior IT management team. They use it to ensure that all parts of their
IT stack are delivering what they should be delivering, when they should
be delivering it.

Perhaps most important
of all, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c enables organizations to move beyond
the old paradigm of multiple independent IT stacks to offer infrastructure
as a service and platform as a service.

Q. As someone
who helps customers make the most of their investment in Oracle technology,
what do you find most promising about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release
4?
A. There are three key areas that are especially exciting. First, it provides
an accelerated path to the cloud. Whether you are building a small, medium,
or large private cloud within your organization, it provides the tools
you need to make it happen, from designing the cloud to provisioning and
testing.

Secondly, this release
provides monitoring and management tools that go both deeper into the
stack and wider across components within the stack. That means an even
more comprehensive dashboard.

Finally Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c Release 4 offers true enterprise-grade management. With the
growth of social and mobile connectivity, the need for a highly performant
and robust stack is more prominent than ever. And Oracle Enterprise Manager
12c is there to do exactly that: manage true, enterprise-grade IT deployments.

Q. What should
Oracle customers do if they want to learn more about the latest release
of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c?
A. First, speak to your Oracle contact, whether it is a partner or Oracle
representative, to get more complete information. Also consider coming
to an Oracle
Day event in your area, especially if you can attend one dedicated
to cloud computing. And in the meantime, you can always head to the Oracle
Enterprise Manager pages on oracle.com to get started.

Wednesday Aug 20, 2014

Check
out all the latest Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c sessions at
this year's Oracle OpenWorld. Organizers of the event, taking place in
San Francisco from September 28 to October 2, expect heavy turnout at
sessions, hands-on labs, and customer panels devoted to Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c. Find out who is participating and which sessions
are most recommended by the Oracle Enterprise Manager team.Read
More

More
than 22,000 votes were cast across 31 different database categories, from
Best Relational Database to Best Database Appliance,
DBTA called the contest a tight race and was "often neck and neck"
between nominees.

"Oracle
has a longstanding commitment to superior manageability for our products.
Oracle Enterprise Manager's continued success and innovations in providing
the leading solution for managing Oracle Database is a prime example of
this commitment. These awards are a further testament to the importance
customers place on Oracle Enterprise Manager." says Moe Fardoost, Senior
Director, Product Marketing for Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Wednesday Jun 04, 2014

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4 (or simply put EM12c R4) is the latest update to the product. As previous versions, this release provides tons of enhancements and bug fixes, attributing to improved stability and quality. One of the areas that is most exciting and has seen tremendous growth in the last few years is that of Database as a Service. EM12c R4 provides a significant update to Database as a Service. The key themes are:

Before we get deep into implementation of a service catalog, lets first understand what it is and what benefits it provides. Per ITIL, a service catalog is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organization provides or offers to its employees or customers. Service catalogs have been widely popular in the space of cloud computing, primarily as the medium to provide standardized and pre-approved service definitions. There is already some good collateral out there that talks about Oracle database service catalogs. The two whitepapers i recommend reading are:

Setup chargeback plans based on service tiers and database configuration sizes, etc

Starting Release 4, the scope of services offered via the service catalog has been expanded to include databases with varying levels of availability - Single Instance (SI) or Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases with multiple data guard based standby databases. Some salient points of the data guard integration:

Standby pools can now be defined across different datacenters or within the same datacenter as the primary (this helps in modelling the concept of near and far DR sites)

The standby databases can be single instance, RAC, or RAC One Node databases

Multiple standby databases can be provisioned, where the maximum limit is determined by the version of database software

The standby databases can be in either mount or read only (requires active data guard option) mode

All database versions 10g to 12c supported (as certified with EM 12c)

All 3 protection modes can be used - Maximum availability, performance, security

Log apply can be set to sync or async along with the required apply lag

The different service levels or service tiers are popularly represented using metals - Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on. The Oracle MAA whitepaper (referenced above) calls out the various service tiers as defined by Oracle's best practices, but customers can choose any logical combinations from the table below:

Primary

Standby [1 or more]

EM 12cR4

SI

-

SI

SI

RAC

-

RAC

SI

RAC

RAC

RON

-

RON

RON

where RON = RAC One Node is supported via custom post-scripts in the service template

A sample service catalogwould look like the image below. Here we have defined 4 service levels, which have been deployed across 2 data centers, and have 3 standardized sizes. Again, it is important to note that this is just an example to get the creative juices flowing. I imagine each customer would come up with their own catalog based on the application requirements, their RTO/RPO goals, and the product licenses they own. In the screenwatch titled 'Build Service Catalog using EM12c DBaaS', I walk through the complete steps required to setup this sample service catalog in EM12c.

2. Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone

In my previous blog posts, i have described the snap clone feature in detail. Essentially, it provides a storage agnostic, self service, rapid, and space efficient approach to solving your data cloning problems. The net benefit is that you get incredible amounts of storage savings (on average 90%) all while cloning databases in a matter of minutes. Space and Time, two things enterprises would love to save on. This feature has been designed with the goal of providing data cloning capabilities while protecting your existing investments in server, storage, and software. With this in mind, we have pursued with the dual solution approach of Hardware and Software. In the hardware approach, we connect directly to your storage appliances and perform all low level actions required to rapidly clone your databases. While in the software approach, we use an intermediate software layer to talk to any storage vendor or any storage configuration to perform the same low level actions. Thus delivering the benefits of database thin cloning, without requiring you to drastically changing the infrastructure or IT's operating style.

In release 4, we expand the scope of options supported by snap clone with the addition of database CloneDB. While CloneDB is not a new feature, it was first introduced in 11.2.0.2 patchset, it has over the years become more stable and mature. CloneDB leverages a combination of Direct NFS (or dNFS) feature of the database, RMAN image copies, sparse files, and copy-on-write technology to create thin clones of databases from existing backups in a matter of minutes. It essentially has all the traits that we want to present to our customers via the snap clone feature. For more information on cloneDB, i highly recommend reading the following sources:

DBaaS deployments tend to be complex and its setup requires a series of steps. These steps are typically performed across different users and different UIs. The Rapid Start Kit provides a single command solution to setup Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Pluggable Database as a Service
(PDBaaS). One command creates all the Cloud artifacts like Roles,
Administrators, Credentials, Database Profiles, PaaS Infrastructure
Zone, Database Pools and Service Templates. Once the Rapid Start Kit has
been successfully executed, requests can be made to provision
databases and PDBs from the self service portal. Rapid start kit can create complex topologies involving multiple
zones, pools and service templates. It also supports standby databases
and use of RMAN image backups.

The Rapid Start Kit in reality is a simple emcli script which takes a bunch of xml files as input and executes the complete automation in a matter of seconds. On a full rack Exadata, it took only 40 seconds to setup PDBaaS end-to-end. This kit works for both Oracle's engineered systems like Exadata, SuperCluster, etc and also on commodity hardware. One can draw parallel to the Exadata One Command script, which again takes a bunch of inputs from the administrators and then runs a simple script that configures everything from network to provisioning the DB software.

Steps to use the kit:

The kit can be found under the SSA plug-in directory on the OMS: EM_BASE/oracle/MW/plugins/oracle.sysman.ssa.oms.plugin_12.1.0.8.0/dbaas/setup

It can be run from this default location or from any server which has emcli client installed

For most scenarios, you would use the script dbaas/setup/database_cloud_setup.py

For Exadata, special integration is provided to reduce the number of inputs even further. The script to use for this scenario would be dbaas/setup/exadata_cloud_setup.py

The database_cloud_setup.py script takes two inputs:

Cloud boundary xml: This file defines the cloud topology in terms of the zones and pools
along with host names, oracle home locations or container database
names that would be used as infrastructure for provisioning database services. This file is optional in case of Exadata, as the boundary is well know via the Exadata system target available in EM.

Input xml: This file captures inputs for users, roles, profiles, service templates, etc. Essentially, all inputs required to define the DB services and other settings of the self service portal.

Once all the xml files have been prepared, invoke the script as follows for PDBaaS:

The script will prompt for passwords a few times for key users like sysman, cloud admin, SSA admin, etc. Once complete, you can simply log into EM as the self service user and request for databases from the portal.

Tuesday Jun 03, 2014

Richer
Service Catalog for Database and Middleware as a Service; Enhanced Database
and Middleware Management Help Drive Enterprise-Scale Private Cloud Adoption

News
Summary
IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven,
self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently
deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete
cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology
stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 meets that requirement by
helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost,
complexity, and risk.

The enhancements
have been driven by customers and the growing Oracle
Enterprise Manager Ecosystem, comprised of more than 750 Oracle
PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partners. Oracle and its partners
and customers have built over 140 plug-ins and connectors for Oracle
Enterprise Manager.

Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption
of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud,
driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog.

The release features
“push button” style provisioning of complete environments
such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that
enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications.

Out-of-the-box
capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide
enhanced cloud service governance along with greater operational control
through a flexible and extensible showback mechanism.

Enhanced
Database Management

A new performance
warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis
and helps identify database problems before they occur.

A Java VM Diagnostics
as a Service feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for
IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions
of defects and performance optimization.

Private roles
and preferred credentials have been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager
to provide additional fine-grained security for organizations with complex
access control requirements.

A new security
console provides a single point of control for managing the security
of Oracle Enterprise Manager environments.

Support for the
latest industry standard SNMP v3 protocol, including encryption, enables
more secure heterogeneous management.

“Smart monitoring”
adapts to observed environmental changes and adds self-management capabilities
to help Oracle Enterprise Manager run at peak performance, while demanding
less IT supervision.

Supporting
Quotes

“Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory has a strong tradition of technology breakthroughs
and leadership. As a member of Oracle’s Customer Advisory Board
for Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have consistently provided feedback
and guidance in the areas of enterprise-scale cloud, self-diagnosability,
and secure administration for the product,” said Tim Frazier,
CIO, NIF and Photon Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“We intend to take advantage of the Release 4 features that support
enterprise-scale availability and fine-grained security capabilities
for private cloud deployments.”

“IDC's most
recent CloudTrack survey shows that most enterprises plan to adopt hybrid
cloud architectures over the next three years,” said Mary Johnston
Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software,
IDC. “These organizations plan to deploy a wide range of workloads
into cloud environments including mission critical database and middleware
services that require high levels of fault tolerance and disaster recovery.
Such capabilities were traditionally custom configured for each application
but cloud offers the possibility to incorporate such properties within
the service definition, enabling organizations to adopt cloud without
compromise. With the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c,
Oracle is providing customers with an out-of-the-box experience for
delivering highly-resilient cloud services for databases and applications.”

“Since its
inception, Oracle has been leading the way in innovative, scalable and
high performance solutions for the enterprise. With this release of
Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are extending this leadership by providing
enterprise-scale capabilities for planning, delivering, and managing
private clouds. We call this ‘zero-to-cloud – accelerated.’
These enhancements help our customers to expedite their adoption of
cloud computing and prepares them for the next generation of self-service
IT,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of Systems
and Cloud Management at Oracle.

Thursday May 15, 2014

The
Oracle Enterprise Manager Applications Management team is pleased to announce
the release of their latest whitepaper (available here)
and associated screenwatch (available here)
on configuration management for Siebel.

The
task of managing configuration parameters in a dynamic, multi-target environment
can be extremely challenging. A large, production scale environment can
have dozens of unique targets, and each target can have several hundred
different configuration parameters.

Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c, with the Siebel Plug-in, provides advanced,
out-of-the-box tools to manage the complexity of Siebel configuration
management. Oracle Enterprise Manager has advanced configuration capture,
change detection, and comparison reporting capabilities that can dramatically
reduce the amount of time that System Administrators spend on configuration
management.

The
purpose of the whitepaper and screenwatch is to provide customers with
details on Oracle’s Best Practices for managing Siebel Configurations.
It addresses several key areas including;

Tuesday Apr 08, 2014

Here
is a great article from resident Oracle ACE, Arup
Nanda, who details insight into predicting the impact of consolidating
separate database workloads into one. The article outlines a typical consolidation
scenario and explains how Oracle Real Application Testing's Consolidated
Database Replay capabilities can help measure the impact of the workload
consolidation. A
must read for those considering a consolidation project in the near future.
Read
the article.

Since the demands
from the business for IT services is non-stop, creating copies of production
databases in order to develop, test and deploy new applications can be
labor intensive and time consuming. Users may also need to preserve private
copies of the database, so that they can go back to a point prior to when
a change was made in order to diagnose potential issues. Using Snap Clone,
users can create multiple snapshots of the database and “time
travel” across these snapshots to access data from any point
in time.

Join us for an in-depth
technical webcast and learn how Oracle Cloud Management Pack for Oracle
Database's capability called Snap Clone, can fundamentally improve the
efficiency and agility of administrators and QA Engineers while saving
CAPEX on storage. Benefits include:

Tuesday Apr 01, 2014

Since
the launch of Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3, we have received tons of
questions around managing Oracle
Multitenant, an Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition option,
and pluggable databases (PDBs)—more specifically; questions about
pluggable database as a service (PDBaaS). In
this blog, we provide answers to some of the common questions from people.

Question:
What qualifies a database to be pluggable?Answer: A pluggable database must be a current Oracle
Database 12c database, configured for multitenant through a new enterprise
edition option called Oracle
Multitenant. It delivers a new architecture that allows a multitenant
container database (CDB) to hold many pluggable databases (PDBs). An Oracle
Database in the old architecture (a “non-CDB”) may be upgraded
to the multitenant architecture via a simple process known as “adopting
the non-CDB as a PDB”. A PDB is a self-contained, fully functional
Oracle Database, and includes its own system, sysaux and user tablespaces.
You can learn more about Oracle Multitenant and pluggable database in
this whitepaper.

Can the pluggable
databases be plugged and unplugged across multiple platforms such as Solaris,
AIX, and Linux? The pluggable
database must be endian compatible. Cross endian operations require OGG,
Data pump or restore from backup.

In terms
of database consolidation, what are the differences between using VMs,
dedicated schemas and pluggable databases?
To describe the advantages of using pluggable database vs. other consolidation
methods, it can be best illustrated in a simply comparison table.

Comparison of Database as a Service Consolidation Models

Pluggable database combines
the best of all the other models and offers excellent consolidation, isolation,
manageability and is suitable for any application that is certified to
run on Oracle Database 12c. With the other models, we see certain shortcomings.
For example, server virtualization offers good isolation but creates compliance
and administrative headaches. Schema based consolidation offers ease of
management and patching, but limited isolation.

How do you
track configuration drift with a pluggable database? I certainly understand
drift in the container database, but in what ways would a pluggable database
drift from its standard baseline?This pertains to Configuration
Drift Tracking via Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. One can compare any
two Enterprise Manager targets or a complete system such as an Oracle
Exadata Database Machine. When you compare at the PDB level, they can
differ in the tablespace names, the storage settings of tablespace with
same name, or users, etc. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager to track drift,
it is particularly useful in comparing difference in your development,
testing, and production environments. It is even useful for comparing
your standby systems to set standards for compliance requirements.

What is a
zone? Is it physical? Regional?
The Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud resource model involves pooling
the same target types where it’s combining similar hosts, databases,
hardware or other similar resources in to a zone. Zones can therefore
be defined by the boundary of the Cloud and exposed through Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c’s self-service portal. In terms of the pluggable database
as a service model, you can create Oracle Multitenant container databases
and group them to form a database pool that users can then draw from.
When the self-service user provisions a pluggable database, they need
to simply specify the Zone where they want to deploy. Internally, Oracle
Enterprise Manager uses load or configuration driven algorithms to place
the PDB in the right CDB.

What will
be the DBA and SYSADMIN role in the pluggable DBaaS environment?
With pluggable databases you have common users and local users as well
as common roles and associated privileges and local roles and associated
privileges. You can isolate user/role/privilege to the PDB by defining
only local user/role/privilege. To leverage the manage many as one, you
would define common user/role/privilege to act on all PDBs or a subset
of PDBs where the common user has create session privileges within the
PDB. You would define DBA roles and SYSADMIN roles based on common and/or
local user roles.

What if you
need custom configurations on a pluggable database? Once the database
is deployed via self-service how do you make changes?
Some parameters are modifiable at the PDB level. You would check v$parameter
ISPDB_MODIFIABLE value to determine what can be changed. Some customization
can be done at the CDB level; however, they would affect all PDBs for
that CDB. Oracle Enterprise Manager’s self-service provides a TNS
Connect string to connect to the PDB with the right privilege and execute
“ALTER SYSTEM” for the parameters that are permissible to
change.

If I'm an
application developer and I request a database with a certain pre-defined
service level, what level of permissions should I expect with that database?
Am I getting DBA or SYSDBA privileges with that request?
It depends on what was negotiated as part of the service definition and
associated user/role/privileges defined for that service.

Are the pluggable
database as a service capabilities for Oracle Database 12c included in
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c? Do we need a plug-in? Do we need to license
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Database Management Packs?
You need the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c database and cloud plug-ins.
License-wise; the self-service provisioning from Oracle Enterprise Manager
is licensed as part of Cloud Management Pack for Database. The Oracle
Multitenant option must be licensed if two or more PDBs are plugged into
a single CDB.
Watch this short demo called “Using
Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS) Self-Service Portal”
for a better understanding of deploying PDBaaS using Oracle Enterprise
Manager 12c.

Which Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Management Packs are required to be able to provide
DBaaS?
You need the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Management Pack for Database
and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Lifecycle Management Pack for Database
to do database as a service. Both of which must be licensed.

If you have
shared memory and background processes in the container database, how
do you allocate server resources to a particular pluggable database? Can
you assign specific amount of CPU cycles, RAM and IOPS for a given pluggable
database? SQL
execution is scoped to the PDB as identified by the con_id created during
session create. In Oracle Database 12c, Resource Manager (RM) has been
extended to include support for Oracle Multitenant. Policies may be defined
at the PDB level in terms of the simple-yet-powerful concepts of “caps”
and “shares” to determine the allocation of resources between
PDBs. In this way, resource manager can control allocation of CPU, sessions
and parallel execution servers. Additionally, on Oracle Exadata, Resource
Manager can also manage IO and network. Memory management currently is
implicitly managed through SGA LRU algorithms and CPU share management.

What is the
largest number of pluggable databases you can deploy on Oracle Exadata?
Currently the PDB limit per CDB is 252 PDBs. In Oracle Real Application
Clusters environments such as Oracle Exadata, the density of PDB consolidation
greatly increases as you may have multiple CDBs per physical server and
252 PDBs per CDB. The maximum limit would be bound by compute resource
constraints/limits. And as mentioned in the question on Zone, Oracle Enterprise
Manager gives an ability to combine multiple CDBs into a Pool and handle
transparent placement. The Oracle Enterprise Manager self-service user
therefore won’t be exposed to the underlying limit.

Can I use
pluggable database as a service if the target database is 9i or 10g?You would need to migrate
the Oracle Database 9i, 10g and 11g databases to Oracle Database 12c non-CDB
and convert them into pluggable databases. The architectural changes within
Oracle Database 12c are not backward compatible.

Can Active
Data Guard be configured for selective pluggable databases from a container
database? I do not want all pluggable databases to have a standby.In
the current release, Oracle Active Data Guard operates at the container
level, however, PDB annotations are tagged in the redo stream, so PDB
operations on the primary are reflected on the standby.

Does RMAN
support pluggable databases?
Scheduled backups are at the CDB layer and include all PDBs. Ad-hoc backups
can be executed on individual PDBs. Individual PDBs can be restored from
backup.